A monthly gathering of mobile and internet industry professionals in Istanbul

August 28, 2006

We will soon kick-off our operations in Istanbul and are
looking tohire talented software developers to join our dynamic team. We
arepoised to start our PR and marketing campaign in the U.S. This is
agreat time to join the team as we develop and introduce hakia's
nextgeneration technology.

Please forward the attached job posting as
you see fit and direct yourfriends/friends' friends to career@hakia.com to apply for the openpositions. We
will hire 4-5 developers and interview rounds will startin early
September.

Having the right attitude is as important as the skill set (in
shortform below).

April 03, 2006

Country PR aside, it's serious that Israeli VC funds have raised $1.2 billion in 2005, and are projected to raise another $1b in 2006. Therefore, it should not be surprising to see events like KinnerNet conference, pulling in about 150 thinkers and innovators to:

discuss topics and concepts that are of interest
to them,in fields such as Software development, internet culture, site
building, blogs, forums, social networks, chat rooms, instant messages,
P2P, search engines, web services, Wi-Fi, open source, Email,
Infrastructure services, Cellular services, Computer games, Interactive
T.V, VOIP, technological trends, Gadgets, Security and more, to share
their thoughts , work-in-progress, show off the latest tech toys and
hardware hacks, and tackle challenging problems. together we will try
to figure where the internet is going and what are the prevailing
trends.

I am jealous as I read Mark, Tom and Loic blog about it. In contrast to the Israeli numbers, the Turkish VC raised in 2005 was $0. In 2006, we expect it to be $0 again. And, we will not have an event like this next year in Istanbul.

A few months ago, on a panel, Yigal Ehrlich had attributed Israel's VC (and innovation) success to government action - resulting in Yozma. As much as I hate looking towards the government (especially the Turkish government), I suspect early stage VC asset class can only be kick-started with a strong nod from the government.

March 29, 2006

Ken Morse, the Managing Director of MIT Entrepreneurship Center, accompanied a group of Sloan Students to Turkey. In Istanbul, they were hosted by the ARI Teknokent, the technopark project of the Istanbul Technical University. I was invited to be a panelist yesterday in a panel discussion titled, "Istanbul: A Globally-Linked "Cool" Hub for Entrepreneurship?" The panel was moderated by Memduh Karakullukcu, the General Manager of ARI Teknokent. The other panelists were:

Aydin Ersoz - CEO of Innova, a leading Turkish enterprise software developerCemil Turun - CEO of Yogurt, an innovative software house with a focus on computer graphicsEvren Unver - General Partner at Turkven, Turkey's only independent private equity fund

We took turns sharing with the audience our view and experiences in entrepreneurship in Turkey. The summary of the discussion, along with the previous night's dinner's topics with Ken Morse, is that Turkey has inherited an entrepreneurial legacy, with Istanbul as the hub of commercial activity in the region for centuries, and right now, economic stabilization, lower interest rates, and the EU ascension plans combine to make Turkey a desirable target for capital.

The picture is fairly clear. All stakeholders seem to agree on the main points. Therefore, we should expect a big boom in entrepreneurial activity in Turkey, right? :)

We'll see...

Two pieces of exciting news from yesterday were that Turkven has closed another deal, bringing their investments to five, and that Innova is contemplating a Turkish IPO.

March 23, 2006

In a move that's definitely ahead of the curve, CNN Turk, has made all of its original programming available as free podcasts and videocasts. I was pointed to this by Altan Alpay, the CEO of Podvertiser, who blogged about it yesterday. CNN Turk is a JV between CNN International and Dogan Media Group, Turkey's dominant media conglomerate. There are further details on the initiative on the CNN Turk website (in Turkish). I see this as the first signal of the forward-leaning stance for Dogan's traditional media channels.

Since the second Istanbul NEG meeting and some of the posts on your blog, I
thought about what you said in terms of investing in media and related sectors,
and so I wanted to ask, or shall I say, put forward a proposal on investing
(time, money, talent, skills etc) in areas related to data-mining and knowledge
management. Information/news in todays world go hand-in-hand together with the
ability to search those digital files, because if you cannot get the information
you want the moment you need/want it, the info becomes junk or useless. And ONLY
the search utility itself is useless unless you know the subject matter
beforehand (i.e. if you never heard about nanotech or biotech it is pretty
unlikely for you to search "nano engineered photovoltaic coating" or
"anti-tumor biotherapeutics drugs"). Search engines are only helpful when you
know the subject matter. You cannot search what you don't know. Also, the
dilemma of "how do you know what you don't know?" issue is generally best
addressed when you have trusted entities to feed you with quality and
filtered news/information like media, schools, libraries, peers or the "wisdom
of crowds" (DIGG or NOOLUYO is a good step in that direction) which
we talked about in our first meeting.

Anyway, no one needs to be reminded of the importance (and succe$$) of Google or
Yahoo, and there are a gazillion news articles and web sites dedicated to search
engines, data mining, deep web etc, heck even the US gov is on a similar path ("albeit
on security concerns, probably using apps like this, this, this, or this ) sometimes
imitating corporations use of similar tech (such as this or that) , but what
I wanted to emphasize is that there is just too much data or information out
there and we poor humans don't have the resources or more importantly the time
to read or go through all that important information.

Even Bill Gates expressed
his frustration at this information overload problem when talking at their
annual meeting of CEOs, adding that "businesses need
to do more to help their employees sort through an ever-growing flood of
information that threatens to become a drain on productivity".

Ditto Accenture Chief Executive, William D. Green on his August 28
interview
at The New York Times when he said "Technology has done a great job at providing
data. People install these large enterprise resource planning systems that
generate a lot of pretty charts. The reports come out. But we have data overload
and information underload. What information management, business analytics and
business intelligence are all about is, how do you take all that and put in it
in a format that helps people make decisions? We think this is going to be a
$27-billion-a-year market in four or five years. We just invested $100 million
in our information management capability."

And lastly, as this and
this
article points out about Deep Web, not everything is indexed by major search
engines:

"Google may have already
indexed 8 billion webpages, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Many more
pages are hidden behind corporate firewalls or in databases waiting to be
indexed. By some estimates, this so-called dark Web is 500 times bigger than the
World Wide Web as we know it. Unlike the public Internet, however, it can't be
retrieved by the usual Web crawlers. Instead, the information must be fed into
search engines' mammoth databases using special retrieval techniques."

So there
you go Cem, here I presented with you with some ideas to think about on Media
and Search, so if you want to invest in anyone of them, don't forget the other
half, they are highly correlated ("IAC/InterActiveCorp. buys Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion."). As for me, I don't have any single solution, but, Web 2.0 (The
Hype and the Hullabaloo of Web 2.0) could be helpful for what I believe will
be one of our biggest problems of the 21st century, namely information overload
and the limited time span people have to get higher signal to noise
ratio.

The bigger the
problem, the bigger there's a chance to build successful and profitable
companies.

And I hope some
smart Turkish entrepreneurs/investors are working on these
issues.